RickyRobinson.id.au

An article from ABC news online reports that a BT scientist, Ian Pearson, thinks that by 2050 it will be possible for a person’s mind to be downloaded and stored by a supercomputer, rather like the constructs that William Gibson envisioned in Neuromancer and subsequent novels. The difference is that Gibson’s constructs were recorded personalities (they respond to questions, but they are not conscious), whereas Pearson is talking about downloading somebody’s mind and having that mind continue on in a conscious state. His belief that this may be possible as early as 2050 seems to be premised upon the rapid advances in computing power. However, surely our knowledge of what constitutes intelligence and consciousness is not advancing at the same rapid rate. Until we fully understand how the human brain operates, I don’t see how it is possible to download somebody’s mind and have it do anything constructive. See, this is a substantially different problem to the one of AI, because it is conceivable, even likely, that the human brain is not the only entity capable of exhibiting intelligence. It might therefore be possible to create an entity that exhibits intelligence, which bears no similarity to the human brain. To have somebody’s mind execute, for want of a better word, on a computer, entails understanding the machine it was intended to operate on: the human brain. Figuring out the human brain (i.e. the hardware) is one thing; replicating that machine in hardware or software is another thing altogether.

While holidaying in France, Karen and I tried a few different wines. I’ve put together a gallery showing a sample of wines we drank. Rosé was our primary tipple, and most of the bottles cost less than €2. Even the fancier stuff from the Ackerman – Rémy Pannier cellar in Saumur only cost between €5 and €6. You can see the gallery here.

Yesterday I splurged on two CDs from The Cat Empire: one album is called, The Cat Empire and the other is called Two Shoes. The band hails from Melbourne, and they play sort of Latin influenced Jazz with a hint of reggae, overlaid with Australian style cosmopolitan hip-hop vocals.

I just noticed that Two Shoes is at the top of the Australian charts, so the above introduction to The Cat Empire probably wasn’t necessary. :)

Karen and I have selected 160 photos from our holiday in France, Belgium and Holland. Here’s one to get you started.

Yesterday evening I found out that Jaga and I had a paper accepted to the Ninth International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems (KES 2005), Special (Invited) Session on Complex Adaptive Systems. The paper is essentially a cut down version of half of the analysis chapter of my thesis (the bit that deals with the ant foraging stuff). The conference will be held in Melbourne in mid-September.

Note: holiday photos will be posted by the end of the week.

As previously mentioned, I’ve taken a development job in Toowong. The company I work for is, for the moment, called global-roam. (I’m told the "roam" part is derived from the initials of the co-founders of the company, one of whom is my boss.) Anyway, global-roam develops software for participants in the National Energy Market (NEM), and has been doing so since 2000. Some of global-roam’s products are already used by close to, if not more than, 50 percent of the participants in the supply-side of the market.

I’m attempting to learn the ins and outs of the NEM while I work on deSide (demand-side), an application intended for use by large energy consumers who buy their electricity directly from the spot market rather than buying it from an energy retailer (like Energex). Large energy consumers, like smelters and so forth, are finding they can save lots of money by buying energy directly from the spot market if they are willing to take the risk (the price of electricity on the spot market fluctuates like a yo-yo; and I thought the price of petrol was the worst offender!). deSide is also an excellent tool for any company considering the possibility of purchasing energy directly from the market.

In addition to general development, I’ve also been tasked with looking at ways to improve the distributed systems aspects of global-roam’s applications (none of global-roam’s applications is a standalone piece of software; there are a host of distributed computing and networks problems to stay on top of).

So that’s what I’m doing. It’s very different from research (although the dress code appears to be just as informal), but I’m enjoying it.

Anna has passed me the music meme. I duly oblige by completing the survey below.

1. Total volume of music files on my computer?
   [ricky@neo]$ du –block-size=1g –summarize /media/music/
   9 /media/music/
2. The last CD I bought was…
   … probably Essential Bach, and that was over a year ago.
3. (a) The last song I listened to before writing this was…
   Golden Brown by The Stranglers.
   (b)Song playing right now:
   Aicha by Khaled.
4. Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me.
   Besides the two above, I reckon the following five get a lot of play time in XMMS.
   1. A Day in the Life by The Beatles
   2. I Don’t Want to Wait by Paula Cole. (And as if to prove it, it started playing while I typed C-o-l-e! Not for the first time I’m left wondering whether I have some sort of psychic connection with this song.)
   3. Karma Police by Radiohead
   4. Four Seasons – Winter by Vivaldi
   5. Amazing by Alex Lloyd.

   Of course, there are so many more.

5. Which 5 people are you passing this baton to, and why?
   
   • Nigel
   • Ben
   • Michael L
   • James
   • Rhys

   No particular reason (except in the case of Rhys, who needs some encouragement to start a blog; I’m not holding my breath).

Karen and I returned to Brisbane this evening. The trip was awesome. No hiccups whatsoever. I even managed to drive on the correct side of the road! I’ll post some photos once we’ve sorted through them all.

I start at my new workplace on Tuesday. Should be interesting!

I’ve had a paper accepted to mBusiness 2005. The paper is about the context-sensitive aspects of my service discovery protocol framed within a hypothetical business application. The conference takes place in Sydney at the Crowne Plaza Darling Harbour in mid-July. Luckily there are a few relevant international conferences that happen to be taking place in Australia this year; my Ph.D. travel bank won’t stretch to overseas trips. In fact, I’m not even sure if I’m still allowed to draw upon travel bank money having submitted my thesis.

Karen and I are leaving for France at 3pm today (right now it’s just after midnight on Saturday morning). I’m almost packed (I think). I can’t wait!

Everything has come together at just the right time: thesis submitted, holiday accommodation and transport arrangements all sorted out and a new job waiting for me when I get back. I accepted an offer of employment with a business in Toowong. But wait; it’s probably not what you’re thinking. Their name does not start with ‘M’, and they don’t do content-based routing. More on that when I get back from Europe.

Up until now I haven’t been able to print to the HP PSC 1210 printer connected to a Windows box in another room of the house. I would send a job to the printer from my Linux box, it would get there, but then the printer would just hang after making a few noises. It turned out that all I needed to do was find the little check box in the printer configuration on the Windows machine that says “Enable bidirectional support” and un-check it. It’s all working beautifully now.

For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for a cheap printer of decent quality, you can’t go past the PSC 1210. ZDNet says that Photo printing likewise was of decent quality for a printer in this price range. My eyes can’t tell the difference between a print from the photo lab and a print from the PSC 1210 at the highest quality setting on photo paper. Of course, it’s also a scanner and a copier, so it’s a bargain for the $300 price tag that ZDNet quoted in March 2003. I’m pretty sure we picked ours up for less than $200 (new) in 2004. I think this model has probably been superseded by now.